Smear Test Scandal

Every stupid thing is discussed in the dail. Why shouldnt a scandal of enormous inepitude not be discussed?
Women who put thrir trust in a system supposedly there to help protect them has instead through incompetence and immorality, failed them.
I dont think the irish answer of yet anothet expensive enquiry is the solution.
Heads should roll and publicly.
People should be made to answer and explain how this has been allowed. But no. Leo will hold an expensive money and time wasting enquiry and we'll be none the wiser at the end because yet another cockup will have reared its ugly head.

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Sam Quentin wrote: »

.................
When at the end of the day nobody as such is to blame,...

tell us again how no one is to blame :

The 16 April memo to the Minister for Healh :

In 2014, the outcomes of the audits of women's smears were used for "educational and training purposes only" by CervicalCheck

In 2015, the HSE decided that the audits of women’s smear tests should be passed on to the women’s treating doctors

Treating doctors got these audits in 2016 to be passed on to the women "as appropriate"

The memo says the CervicalCheck test may only pick up six out of ten abnormalities and so has a high level of false negative results.

OP, you seem to be totally missing the point. This is a major incompetence issue. People have died and more will die because of it. People who did nothing wrong, still haven't been given the full facts of their illness. I wonder if you were affected would you have the same attitude?

Sam Quentin wrote: »

So are we about to have another enquiry and at the end of it all are lots of women going to seek cash from the Irish taxpayer as compensation...
It's already taking up valuable time in the Dail,.. with the 'opposition' parties shouting and blaming everyone but themselves!? When at the end of the day nobody as such is to blame, nothing is fool proof.. Cant we just be glad that the smear tests globally have saved millions of lives.....

Seriously what is wrong with you? What happened in your life that you have such a lack of empathy and understanding for something so outrageous?

Couple of things i have picked up on the topic and im not following every bit of it.

1. Smear tests do save lives globally but the model we moved from was set on a 3 year cycle and we outsourced to a company that does tests with expectation of a yearly checkup. The difference is 2-3 minutes reviewing the tests compared to a required 20-30 minutes to do it properly, the reason the american system is quick is the expectation is a follow up in a year and it will be picked up then.
2. Some doctors argued with the testing service about who had to tell the woman it happened (this alone is horrible).
3. This was something that was picked up ahead of time and flagged before the service was moved.
4. 17 women to-date have died.

If you want to be angry about anything be angry that for a first world country we pull some pretty dodgy **** with our citizens. At the end of the day more then likely bar a few token heads nothing will change and we will have another scandal down the line.

3000 + women caught up in this

Sam Quentin wrote: »

If it effected me or any of my family..
Then I wouldn't have the same attitude.
What's your point?

Please stop embarrassing yourself.

These are our mothers wives sisters and daughters we are talking about here the bedrock of families and some faceless group around a table made this decision that has and will destroy thousands of lives and not just our women directly effected

A few life sentences handed down would change the faceless unaccountable culture of decision making in this country forever

There needs to be a criminal offence of withholding information that can cause harm or death.

It's not just a failed test, there was yet another HSE cover up. This harks back to the blood transfusion scandal; it's ridiculous that something like this should be allowed to happen. Typical 'Compo begrudgery' without any empathy or thought as to the nuances involved.

Discodog wrote: »

There needs to be a criminal offence of withholding information that can cause harm or death.

I would imagine that would be covered under existing manslaughter legislation if it happened.

I was going to avoid this topic because it is a lose lose to go against the rabid herd but I can't let that comment go. There is definitely an impression out there that the HSE knew people had undetected cancer and deliberately didn't inform them. What actually happened in the case of Vicky Phelan was that she had her second test as scheduled in 2014. That test, tragically, revealed an aggressive cancer for which she was treated unsuccessfully. The HSE then went back to her original test to ascertain why the cancer was so advanced and, with presumably with the benefit of hindsight, they spotted signs in the first test. Maybe other cases were different. I am sure we will find out in 10 years after the next tribunal.

The dilemma after discovering a false negative is do you inform someone who is receiving debilitating cancer treatments such as Chemo and radiation that, you know what, we should have spotted this three years ago when it would have been relatively straight forward to treat. Would that have helped her or depressed her? I don't know the answer to that and we obviously should develop a protocol around it.

Instead the HSE told individual doctors that they would leave it up to them to decide if the patients should be told. That is being reported on as being callous in the extreme when, to me it seems eminently sensible that some people might be too fragile mentally to be told that and it might set them back. (I also wouldn't want to have to make that decision).

My heart goes out to Vicky Phelan. She is facing her ordeal with courage and grace and has done us all a favour in exposing the inadequacies of the screening programme. But is there any chance we could sit down and analyse where we can improve it, and leave the outrage at home.

If I wouldn't just be out of the hospital after a treatment I'd get myself re-tested asap.

The whole thing is a farce and what's even worse is that the whole thing in the first place happens because it is all about money. According to my gyn back home cervical cancer usually develops slowly but it happens to a lot of women having abnormal cells in their lifetime and it's important to observe them once they're there. In a lot of cases they disappear on their own.
The truth is that an annual smear is the way to go to catch abnormalities effectively, because once cancer is there it gets nasty because it's an absolute b1tch to treat. I remember a few months ago there was talk about extending the timeframe to 5 years between the smear tests "because it's not necessary to get tested that often". Yes it absolutely fcuking is. The horrible thing about cervical cancer is that it doesn't show signs until a very late stage and when women are admitted with symptoms of the cancer it is incurable in most cases. This particular cancer is a silent killer and pretty much the whole population is exposed to the virus that's causing it.

I really hope that someone is forced to take responsibility for it. I really hope that the Lab is stripped of their contract and it won't be outsourced again. I really hope that all women affected from this scandal get compensated.

I had a smear mess up once too, I called the gyn's office for some trivial appointment months after my smear and the receptionist told me casually that I have pre-cancerous cells. Why did nobody tell me?? She tried to play it down, I was crying for days, I've never been so scared in my life. I went to another gyn for a biopsy and it came back as all clear. I was absolutely terrified and I can't even imagine how Vicky Phelan or other affected women must feel.

My understanding of this is as follows, and I could be wrong, so please let me know.
A screening service is not the same as a diagnosis, and there will always be an unavoidable percentage of false negatives. (Possibly false positives also) Even if this % is overall low, since the numbers getting screened are very high the actual number of false positives will be high.

In this case however there were issues surrounding the quality of the screening, which meant the number of false positives were higher than they should have been. Apparently we used American labs which work on the basis of yearly tests but faster throughput therefore more false positives, but this would even out since the tests would be done more often, so a false positive one year would more than likely be rectified the following year.

We used 3 year screening therefore more robust quality assurance was required with the screening test. There would still have been false positives but there should have been less.
There were resignations over this in 2008. That is one issue that needs to be addressed.
I think it is accepted that false positives are unavoidable so a screening result never provides 100% reassurance but is still much better over a population than no screening.

The other issue was informing the women involved. Again my understanding is that the women already had a cancer diagnosis, so when the false positive was discovered it would have no further impact on the treatment being given.
Obviously if the screening been correct initially, it would have been massively important but if you are in that statistically chance of a false positive it can't be avoided. Obviously this is cold comfort to the individual but does not necessarily mean the screening is at fault - so long as the incidence of false positives is as low as possible. 
The real damage will be if people don't take part in the screening process, despite these tragic stories it has still saved many lives. The HPV vaccine also needs better uptake to tackle this dreadful cancer.

Also the women should have been informed as soon as possible, it was their right to know